THE ATOM AND SMALLPOX

Then, in 1798, Edward Jenner, an English country doctor, found that inoculation of people with cowpox - a disease dangerous to cattle, but not to humans - was equally effective in producing immunity to smallpox, thus almost completely removing the already small risk of inoculation.Did that silence the diehard opposition? Not at all; they continued to point out that inoculation was interference with God' s will and a wanton practice of spreading infection among healthy people. [More: Plagues and Peoples by W.H. McNeill, Doubleday, 1976, $10.]

That reminds us, of all things, of the four floating plants ordered by New Jersey's Public Service E&G from Offshore Power Systems in Florida. Faced with land-based superstition mongers and siting problems, PSE&G decided to have the plants on barges, towed from Florida to their location 2.8 miles off the N.J. coast, where each will be surrounded by huge breakwaters (AtE Mar 74) designed to withstand tidal waves, hurricanes and accidental collision with ships. There will be no neighbors, no siting problems, no warming of rivers, and the single danger of a nuclear plant, a core melt, which even for land-based plants presents a minute risk, will be lower: "Resulting consequences at ocean-based FNP's are about one order of magnitude lower in estimated impact to man than those from a comparable land-based accident," says the detailed generic study by the US NR(: (9/10/1976), and a similar conclusion has since been reached by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

The reaction of the reactionaries is much the same as that of their forefathers to smallpox inoculation. They worry about the impact to the tourist trade, ignoring what happens to it when the lights go out. The endless litigation (first in Florida, now in New Jersey) is on again. Dr Willard Rosenberg, Atlantic County physician, worries about saboteurs getting at the plant by ship or aircraft. He is singularly unworried about what saboteurs could do to tens of thousands in Jersey City with oil smoke if they set the oil storage complexes along the Hudson Estuary alight a nightmare that was close to coming true in the Bayonne, N.J., oil fire of 1973, but left the good doctor quite unperturbed about improving the safety of energy sources.

Instead, he wonders who will want to catch radioactive fish. Every fisherman from St. Peter to New Jersey's Floating Canneries has always wanted to; for all fish are radioactive. The good doctor is probably innocent of the knowledge that he is radioactive himself.